In a videoconference, the participants can hear/see one party, multiple parties, or all other participants by encoding/decoding and transmission of video and audio data. At present, videoconference systems mainly include a narrow-band videoconference system that employs ITU-T H.320 Series standard and a VoIP videoconference system that employs H.323 Series standard. Referring to FIG. 1, a videoconference system mainly includes a Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) 1 and terminals 2. MCU 1 can control multiple terminals in the videoconference. Since all video and audio data has to be processed by MCU 1 (sometimes encoding/decoding is also required). The access capability and data processing capability of MCU 1 limit the maximum number of videoconferences supported as well as the maximum number of terminals 2. Furthermore, compared with terminals 2, MCU 1 is more expensive, and thereby is a precious resource in videoconference systems. Therefore, a conference management system is required to perform conference dispatching and allocation of MCU resource.
In general, traditional videoconference systems are oriented to enterprises and private network markets, and the conference management system mainly pertains to either of the following two solutions:
The first solution: The MCU manufacturer provides a local conference management system 41 or a conference management system embedded in MCU 1 for managing terminals 2, as shown in FIG. 2. In this solution, a dedicated administrator has to be assigned for each MCU 1; the subscribers request for conference dispatching to the administrator via network 3 by telephone, fax, or email; the administrator performs dispatching for the corresponding conference in the videoconference system in accordance with the requests from subscribers. If a cascade conference has to be dispatched, the administrator has to determine which terminals 2 are under MCU 1 manually and create cascaded conference sites manually.
The second solution: if there are multiple MCUs 1, usually the conference is managed in a centralized manner, as shown in FIG. 3. That is to say, a dedicated conference management system 43 is used to manage the multiple MCUs 1. Such a videoconference system usually provides a subscription interface, through which the subscribers can request for conference dispatching; the conference management system 43 will accomplish the allocation of MCU 1 resource and the cascading automatically.